


bunrei

by kintsugi (beta_wooper)



Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon - All Media Types, Pocket Monsters: Sword & Shield | Pokemon Sword & Shield Versions
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-05
Updated: 2020-07-05
Packaged: 2021-03-05 03:08:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25097407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beta_wooper/pseuds/kintsugi
Summary: Each of them carries a mask that used to be their face when they were human. Sometimes they look at it and cry.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 38
Collections: The Zoroark Games - Summer 2020





	bunrei

**Author's Note:**

> cw: descriptions of parental death

Allister was nine when he met the ghost that wore his face.

The ghost appeared while the sage was explaining Father’s new name. The rechristening was necessary, said the sage, to ensure that when anyone talked about Father now, his ghost would not hear and come back to Earth to answer.

As he was speaking, the sage held a candle in his hands. The wick slowly died down, and when the fire was about to be extinguished, he touched the flame to the edge of Father’s picture and let the fire catch the corners and turn it to soot. The soot he gathered and mixed into a bowl of red ink, which he then used to brush the characters of Father's new name into a long scroll of paper. He showed it to the people gathered, and then, careful not to let the edges touch, he placed it at the shrine where Father’s picture had been.

“Great hand of time, we send you this spirit. Watch over him for eternity,” the sage intoned. He draped the edges of the scroll over the filigree of the purple dragon that twisted around the base of the candle.

“For eternity,” repeated the assembled crowd.

Allister, with his tiny back like a pillar, stared straight ahead as the sage closed his palms over the candle to smother it. Mother wrapped one arm around him and pulled Allister close; the boy’s torso was rigid. He did not say a word.

When the ceremony was done, he stayed bolted in his seat for the vigil. He recognized many of the faces in the crowd who chose to stay; his father had many friends. Some of them came to talk to them and offer small words of comfort. Allister kept his head bowed and thanked them politely.

 _“So dignified_ ,” he heard an auntie say to her husband as they made their way back to their seats. _“To lose a parent so young.”_

 _“You look just like him,”_ said Father’s brother in a broken voice. _“I didn’t realize.”_

The vigil lasted eight hours. Allister watched the dawn creep in through the far window. A tongue of sunlight stretched across the room until it finally reached the edge of the coffin, and then showered the scroll with Father’s new name in bright light.

“It is done,” said the sage quietly, and nothing more.

The sage did not tell anyone to leave, but once every character in the scroll was lit up, the funeral party began to disperse wordlessly.

The ghost hovered over his right shoulder, as it had since the previous evening. When the foot of the coffin was covered in light, three more sages joined the first. They lifted the coffin and slid it into the mausoleum in the spot with his father's new name.

Then it was all over. Mother took his hand and walked out of the room. She cried. Allister was stony. A neighbor came to pick them up and drove them home.

When he and Mother arrived back to their quiet, empty house, Allister went up to his room and began slowly untwisting the tie from around his neck. That was when the ghost pressed its face through the wall behind him.

Allister noticed first the way the sunlight glinted off of its silvery mask, distorted splashes of white tracing out the contours of its lips and cheeks. Its eyes stared hollowly back at him; the sockets melted into darkness. Its mouth was twisted into a wide, gap-toothed smile. There was nothing in its pupils, nothing at all. A tiny glint of purple peeked out from behind the left ear.

He finished slipping the tie from his collar. Carefully, he began to roll it into a neat circle. “Hello,” he said quietly to the ghost in the mirror, not turning around.

The ghost recoiled, not stopping until it was almost merged up against the far wall. “You can see me?”

“Of course I can,” Allister replied.

In a quieter voice, almost as if to itself, the ghost repeated, “You can see me.”

The ghost lingered around the fringes of his room. First it went to the stacks of the books on his shelf, a collection that formed a rainbow ladder of spines that reached the ceiling. It floated, almost longingly, over the desk, scattered with empty notebooks and wads of crumpled up papers. Around the drawings hung up over the bed, the ghost hesitated for a moment, as if to straighten one of the hangings, but it pulled up short.

Halfway through folding up his jacket, Allister’s hands froze. He looked up in the mirror, and he found his black eyes staring into the ghost’s blank ones. “Why are you here?” he asked.

The ghost looked back at him, its smile cast all the way across its face in curves of silver and grey. “You seem lonely. May I stay a while?”

Mother did not believe ghosts were any different from other pokémon. She, like Allister, had been born in Galar. But his father grew up far away, and he knew all about them. They were not to be trusted. If you did not carefully tend to the kamidana, if you let the candles at the shrine go out, the kami would not be able to protect you. Then the foul spirits would sneak in through your windows, or your doors, or even from between your floorboards, and you would never be seen again.

They were dangerous, his father had warned, and not to be trusted. Do not listen to the spirits who should have moved on. They lingered for a reason, and those reasons were never good.

But the ghost wasn’t wrong when it said Allister was lonely. “Okay,” he said.

So the ghost followed him as he went about his day. He very carefully folded up his funeral clothes and put them away. He accepted the neighbors’ chrysanthemums and lined them up the entryway. He helped Mother carefully unfold and count up the satchets of money that had been pressed into her hands before the vigil. He swept the hallway. He made his bed. He made Mother’s bed. He swept the hallway again.

Finally, when he was rearranging the flowers in the entryway for the third time, the ghost spoke up. “What are you doing?”

“Organizing.”

“It’s nearly midnight. Shouldn’t you be sleeping?”

Allister’s eyes were lined with dark bags. His hands were red and puffy from the day’s work. “I don’t want to sleep.”

“You haven’t slept in so long. Let’s go upstairs to bed,” the ghost pleaded.

It was true. He hadn’t slept since before the vigil.

Allister looked blankly at his ghost. The stories his father had told him pounded through his head. Ghosts meant that you’d done bad things. No one but you could see them, but they would always be there. They showed up when you did bad things, and they were bad things that stayed with you for the rest of your life.

“I can’t sleep,” Allister confessed.

“Okay,” said the ghost. “Let’s play, then.”

Allister stared blankly. “Play? You want to play?”

“It’ll be fun,” pressed the ghost. A little wisp of black shadow reached out from beneath the ghost’s mask and wrapped around Allister’s hand. For a second, there was a flash of white and red at the ghost’s heart, and then it was gone. “C’mon!”

The ghost pulled Allister upstairs, back to his room. It floated quickly around the room, surveying, and then grabbed the notebooks and pens off of Allister’s desk. “We could make pictures!”

Allister stood mutely as the ghost scrambled around, gathering supplies. From behind the mask, it sprouted a little wisp of shadow into the shape of a hand, and it twirled up a red pot of paint and a fat brush into its grasp. Satisfied, it began scribbling onto the white of the paper.

The ghost looked up. “Are you going to paint?”

“My father used to paint with me,” Allister said quietly. “He always said that painting was a way to put your emotions on the outside. Good art comes from in here.” He gently tapped his chest.

Halfway through its third picture, the ghost stopped. “Oh?”

“My father is dead.”

The ghost said nothing, and continued to paint.

“He sounded like you, a little.”

Behind its mask, the ghost blinked. It finished adding the branches onto a tree, blotted in the rays of the sun. But it did not respond.

“Are you my father?” Allister asked.

At this, the ghost finally looked up. It stared at Allister with level, purple eyes. “You said your father left you. But I'm still here.”

“What’s your name?”

“Does it matter?”

Allister tilted his head to consider. It didn’t really matter, he supposed.

“Then come paint,” said the ghost. “It’ll be fun.”

They painted until dawn. Allister dozed off a little after the sun rose. His mother would knock on the door and find him alone, sprawled out amidst a pile of paintings, a silver mask on the ground beside him.

So they continued their days in a similar way for a very long time. Allister went back to school the following week. Someone must have told the rest of his friends, because they all treated him very gently. They let him win when they played hide and seek in the schoolyard. His teacher didn’t give him any homework, and let him color during tests if he wanted.

“Do you think they have ghosts too?” Allister asked his ghost as they walked back from school one day.

“Who? Your classmates?”

Allister nodded. “I’m sure some of them do.”

“Let’s look more carefully when we see them next, then.”

At school the next day, Allister watched them. His teacher seemed to have a strange shadow that hovered over her shoulders, almost like the shawl that was draped around her neck. A boy in the form below him, who used to skip quickly through the schoolyard last year, stepped heavily in the grass.

At night, Allister and the ghost painted what they saw. He made a picture of a purple specter with enormous teeth that hung its arms around the boy’s neck and pulled him to the ground. A wispy, bleached-white skeleton twined through his teacher’s ribcage and made her stand stiffly at attention.

His ghost drew a different set of paintings altogether. A blobby purple figure with a wide smile told jokes to a little boy and made him giggle. A chunk of coral grew like a tree in the middle of a field so that a woman in a shawl could lean on it.

“You make them so sad,” said the ghost.

Allister shrugged, and continued to add more teeth to his drawing. “They seem lonely.” It was just them and their ghosts, after all.

“I heard that art was shaped by how you see things.”

“My father told me that, once.” Allister put down the brush and stared levelly at his ghost. “Who are you?”

“I don’t remember my name.”

“I didn’t mean that.” Allister had twisted one hand deep into the roots of his hair. “Who are you?”

The ghost’s mask had his father's nose, and eyes, and lips. But it had Allister’s smile, the one he used to have, the one he could recognize in all the pictures of himself but that he couldn’t see in the mirror now.

It wasn’t fair. Father had left and would never return. The sage had made sure to give him a different name, to make sure his ghost and his body didn’t mix each other up. But the sage hadn’t given a new name to Allister, even though rechristening him with a red pot of ink would’ve helped everyone understand that he was different now, that he didn’t feel like his old face fit any more. Not when everyone who looked at it saw Father instead.

“You seemed lonely,” said the ghost. It wasn’t an answer.

“I know who you are,” said the boy. It wasn’t a response.

The ghost tilted its head to one side. “Oh?” it asked with a laugh.

Allister reached down and plucked the mask from the ghost’s face.

Beneath was a seething mask of shadow, splotches of darkness that twisted themselves into knots, vaguely forming the shape of a body. It seemed tattered on the edges, like it was barely able to hold itself together. Even now, the edges dissolved with just the slightest breeze, only to reform again. Somewhere in the mess of shadows it clutched at a crude sketch of Father’s face in red ink.

A pair of purple eyes glistened with what looked like tears. The ghost’s smile faded as it blinked up at Allister. “Here I am,” it said dully, dejectedly. “Surprise.”

Allister looked at the ragged ghost beside him. It pretended to be his joy, but it couldn’t be anymore, not now that he’d seen what he’d seen. That was what his father had said about ghosts. They were liars. You couldn’t trust them.

The ghost looked longingly at the mask in Allister’s hands, the image of the boy the two of them used to be.

Allister’s knuckles whitened around the mask, and then he cast it aside and threw his hands around the ghost’s slender body. The ghost was cold, and the edges of its body stung at his skin, but he held it close to his chest.

The ghost cried into Allister’s shoulder. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier. It’s just … I was so lonely when Father died.”

“I know,” said Allister. “I was too.”

They sat like that for a while, Allister sitting by the base of his bed and the ghost curled up in his arms.

“I can’t be Allister again, can I,” the ghost said after a while. It stared at the piece of paper tangled up in its wispy fingers.

“No, I don’t think so. I don’t think I can be, either,” said the boy. He was pretty sure that no amount of effort would put the ghost and him back together. “But we could try.”

After another long silence, the ghost said, “I don’t think I want to.”

“That’s okay.”

Allister looked at the mask. The mask looked at him.

The ghost traced where Allister’s eyes led. “You can have it back, if you want,” it said quietly. “It’s too big for me.”

The mask looked so much like Father. “It’ll fit you one day,” said Allister. “And when it does I won't need it any more.”

“You think so?”

“I’ll give it back to you when it does,” Allister promised, and fastened the mask to his face.


End file.
